


home (and you don’t even know it)

by moonbeatblues



Series: refuge [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Blood and injury mention, F/F, Mutual Pining, mutual pining Three Ways!! the possibilities!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-22
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21521152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “So much changed while you were gone, I barely know what to talk about, you know? I missed you all the time and I scried on you almost every day, and you were always crying and it made me cry. That’s how I knew you were in there, because you were crying.”(two more things i wrote after 85 and 86)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Jester Lavorre/Yasha
Series: refuge [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1560958
Comments: 9
Kudos: 242





	home (and you don’t even know it)

Nott doesn’t get it.

Nott doesn’t get it, and she’s definitely going to tell her.

Or Caleb, at least.

—

It’s dark out, and even from inside Beau can feel the heat the top layer of sand’s trapped in from the day, drowsy, reticent to leave and rejoin the night air as something colder. 

She leaves her hair down— calls it a promise she’ll go back to bed soon.

Jester’s in the kitchen, the big bay windows open to the water and curtains pushed inward on the wind. She doesn’t move when Beau hooks her chin over her shoulder, just sinks down a little in her chair. 

Nugget’s curled at her feet, tail thumping lazily with his efforts to stay awake. He’ll have to stay with Marion this weekend, Beau thinks, so they can take the trip up to the Blooming Grove. 

It’s strange, still, not to have Caduceus and Fjord around all the time. They’re coming back, she knows, but the Grove needs time to heal, and hands to heal it. She tries to think of the tea they’ll  bring back, and not the tamped-down fear of being spread out like this. 

It’s okay, after all, really. Caleb can get them all in the same place in a matter of minutes if it’s really an emergency, even from his studies in Rohsona. He’s close, he keeps saying, really close to figuring out how to make it stick. And they’ll be together again then, too, to be with Nott when it happens, and maybe then things will be settled enough for everyone to come back to Nicodranas with Beau and Jester, and stay this time. Finally haunt the other houses on the beachfront or even just Beau and Jester’s other rooms, fulfill the promise of wearing out the too-new floorboards. The promise to _stay_ that Beau has to keep reminding herself they never really made, even if it feels broken.

It’s funny, the process peace requires, even after everything. How for so obvious it used to seem that they’d just move back into the Xhorhouse, or buy a big place by the ocean only a few minutes’ walk down from the Chateau, it was so easy for them to be pulled apart. 

Only temporarily, though. Of course. Just until things settle down.

Jester sifts her hand absentmindedly through Beau’s hair. 

“It’s getting so long,” she says, and the tone wakes her up. Strangely hollow, quiet enough to be carried off by the sound of the tide.

Her other hand curls and uncurls mindlessly on the counter, and Beau watches it thinking of the thin little bands of silver she spent the morning hammering out nice and round while Jester was visiting her mother. It’s nothing as ornate as Jester’s other rings, not even close to the pearl she keeps to send an extra message every night to whoever she decides needs it, but it’s a thing about Jester she keeps close to the chest, that she has a soft spot for simpler jewelry.

Especially, Beau likes to think, when she makes it.

“Beau?” 

“Hmm?”

“How are we going to get here?”

—

Beau wakes up with the distinct, terrible feeling of her ribs pulling inward, to the still-unfamiliar darkness of her Expositor’s room. To silence, and to the loose, grounding weight of Jester’s hand in hers.

She squeezes her eyes shut. The others are down the hall. Just down the hall. A trip of Caleb’s alarm spell away. 

The others are down the hall, and this is the Jester that Beau’s thoughts circle back to rather than start at and move outward, to something more promising. A future.

She’d thought she was patient, for a while, but it might just be that it’s easier to wait for something you don’t think will come. Easy, in this awful way, to feel so _much_ of something and be sure in the same breath that it means nothing.

Jester makes some unhappy noise in her sleep, tugs Beau’s hand closer to her chest, and Beau swallows down the taste of metal still heavy in her throat, her nose, from the poison. In the same breath she wishes so immensely for Nott to both shut up forever and please for the love of the _gods_ find out if she should stop holding her breath when Jester crawls into her bed (and stopped coming up with reasons to months ago).

_Nothing will come of it_ _,_ she thinks, screws her eyes shut and doesn’t think about Jester watching her read the letter from Keg. Jester watching her kiss Reani and flushing that roiling, bruise-purple and stammering something and going to talk to Caduceus.  _Nothing, nothing, nothing._

* * *

It’s funny, how Yasha sees it immediately.

How she sees it even through the clearing haze, watches Jester’s flickery duplicate straddle Beau’s body and hold her by the face— Caduceus heals with just a touch, sometimes less; Jester does everything from blow kisses to bear hugs. It’s not necessary, is the point, she didn’t need to get that close, and Yasha finds herself thinking about it even as they’re scrambling to barricade the door and sinking down to rest.

Beau’s robes—new, she realizes, and fancy— are soaked through with her own blood, torn on both sides because Yasha had— she’d stabbed _through_ Beau, and the feeling of the blade hitting stone, grinding, makes her fingers itch.

Beau flinches when she touches her shoulder, hard, and whips around. There’s a rabbity look in her eye that doesn’t fade, not all the way, but she breathes out shakily and uncurls her hands, bruises paling and shrinking on her skin.

  
She tries to smile up at Yasha and it comes out crooked and wrong, and Yasha feels massive, suddenly so afraid of crowding her in, frantic even though she knows healing doesn’t get rid of blood, because there’s so _much_ and it’s _her fault._

She sits against the wall while they rest, head tipped onto her knees, and thinks about night watches— Beau sprawling next to her just outside of the dome, blood-filthy robes staining the grass.  
She thinks about Beau jumping at her touch, and about Beau sinking drowsily under the hands of Jester’s duplicate.

She thinks about Beau’s eyes widening impossibly when she’d stabbed her, chest caught on an inhale, quiet and so still all at once, blood staining the both of them.

  
There’s this dark curl in the back of her skull— _you thought she looked pretty_ — and she slams her palms against her ears.

Jester comes and sits by her, quiet, and after a few minutes reaches for Yasha’s hand, draws it into her lap.  
She turns her head to watch Jester trace little lines in the center of her palm, spirals that glow pink and fade, like the blink of fireflies.

“I missed you.”

She says nothing.

Jester shuffles a little closer, carries on talking low and sweet, carries on drawing symbols over Yasha’s knuckles, lets her shoulder press into Yasha’s.

“I have some more flowers for you, from Uthodurn, they grow all white and pale green there. I’m sure Reani could make you some more when we see her again— you’d love her, Yasha, she grows plants even better than Caduceus— but maybe she’d just want to talk to Beau.”

Jester sucks in a shaky breath, furrows her eyebrows a little.

“Beau kissed her before we left and maybe other things also, and it’s _fine_ , Reani is really cool and nice and pretty and she can turn into animals as much as she wants instead of just twice a day, except they kissed right in front of us? Which is just rude.”

She laces their hands together and squeezes a little too tight, knuckles going pale.

“And anyway, we were there for Fjord, and he’s a paladin now, did you see? He got all wrapped up in seaweed, and now he talks to Caduceus about the Wildmother all the time.

“So much changed while you were gone, I barely know what to talk about, you know? I missed you all the time and I scried on you almost every day, and you were always crying and it made me cry. That’s how I knew you were in there, because you were crying.”

It’s a bit awkward, uncurling so Jester can lean over and hug her, pressing her face into Yasha’s neck so Yasha feels instead of sees tears sliding down to her collarbones.

“No more crying after this, okay? Only happy tears.” The little moon hanging from her horn dips and rises with her breathing, and Yasha can see the thin lines of a tattoo trailing across the back of her neck, and Jester is so much like Molly in that moment that she can’t quite breathe.

“Okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi @seafleece on tumblr and yell about these past few eps with me!!! they’ve been so wack!!


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